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Digital Government eröffnet Möglichkeiten, Verwaltungs- und Regierungsprozesse kritisch zu reflektieren und sie entsprechend neu zu denken. Oblagen Bürgerbeteiligungsprozesse in der Vergangenheit zahlreichen Hürden, bietet die e‑Partizipation Möglichkeiten, sie mit modernen Technologien zu verbinden, die eine niedrigschwellige Teilhabe ermöglichen. In dem Forschungsprojekt Take Part, gefördert durch das Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, werden innovative Formen der Beteiligung von Bürger:innen in der Stadt- und Bauplanung mithilfe von Augmented und Virtual Reality (AR und VR) erforscht. Dabei geht es vor allem darum, neue Anreize zu schaffen, Bürger:innen zur Beteiligung zu motivieren und durch diese das Konfliktpotential um Bauprojekte zu reduzieren. Mithilfe der innerhalb von Take Part entwickelten App können Bürger:innen Bauvorhaben diskutieren, Feedback geben oder über sie abstimmen, während sie dabei den Beteiligungsgegenstand anschaulich in AR und VR präsentiert bekommen. Zugleich können auch Initiator:innen mithilfe eines Partizipationsökosystems die Beteiligung im jeweiligen Bauvorhaben konfigurieren, indem sie sowohl vorhandene Module kombinieren und konfigurieren, als auch passende Dienstleistungen, wie beispielsweise 3D-Modellierungen, einkaufen. In diesem Beitrag sollen die konkreten technologischen Entwicklungen (u. a. Outdoor-AR-Tracking und räumlich verankerte Diskussionen), sowie das Partizipationsökosystem (Dienstentwicklungs- und Ausführungsplattform) vorgestellt werden. Erstmalig soll so der entwickelte Prototyp umfassend dargestellt werden. Auf die Herausforderung, eine e‑Partizipations-App zu entwickeln, die die Möglichkeit bietet, verschiedene Interaktionskonzepte ineinander zu integrieren und gleichzeitig eine überzeugende User-Experience bietet, soll ebenfalls eingegangen werden. Anschließend wird das Potenzial einer solchen Lösung für die digitale Mitbestimmung in lokaler Verwaltung vor allem in Bezug auf gesteigerte Vorstellungskraft und Motivation zur Teilhabe für Nutzer:innen diskutiert und in den Kontext der Covid-19 Pandemie gesetzt.

ABSTRACTSince its inception, explaining the cognitive foundations governing sensory experiences of supernatural agents has been a central topic in the cognitive science of religion. Following recent developments in perceptual psychology, this pre-registered study examines the effects of expectations and sensory reliability on agency detection. Participants were instructed to detect beings in a virtual forest. Results reveal that participants expecting a high probability of encountering an agent in the forest are much more likely to make false detections than participants expecting a low probability of such encounters. Furthermore, low sensory reliability increases the false detection rate compared to high sensory reliability, but this effect is much smaller than the effect of expectations. While previous accounts of agency detection have speculated that false detections of agents may give rise to or strengthen religious beliefs, our results suggest that the reverse direction of causality may also be true. Religious teachings may first produce expectations in believers, which in turn elicit false detections of agents. These experiences may subsequently work to confirm the teachings and narratives upon which the values of a given culture are built.

Due to mass customization product variety increased steeply in the automotive industry, entailing the increment of worker’s cognitive load during manual assembly tasks. Although worker assistance methods for cognitive automation already exist, they proof insufficient in terms of usability and achieved time saving. Given the rising importance of simulation towards autonomous production planning, a novel approach is proposed using human simulation data in context of worker assistance methods to alleviate cognitive load during manual assembly tasks. Within this paper, a new concept for augmented reality-based worker assistance is presented. Additionally, a comparative user study (N=24) was conducted with conventional worker assistance methods to evaluate a prototypical implementation of the concept. The results illustrate the enhancing opportunity of the novel approach to save cognitive abilities and to induce performance improvements. The implementation provided stable information presentation during the entire experiment. However, with regard to the recentness, there has to be carried out further developments and research, concerning performance adaptions and investigations of the effectiveness.

One key aspect of the Internet of Things (IoT) is, that human machine interfaces are disentangled from the physicality of the devices. This provides designers with more freedom, but also may lead to more abstract interfaces, as they lack the natural context created by the presence of the machine. Mixed Reality (MR) on the other hand, is a key technology that enables designers to create user interfaces anywhere, either linked to a physical context (augmented reality, AR) or embedded in a virtual context (virtual reality, VR). Especially today, designing MR interfaces is a challenge, as there is not yet a common design language nor a set of standard functionalities or patterns. In addition to that, neither customers nor future users have substantial experiences in using MR interfaces.

Seit Jahrzehnten versucht die Universitätsbibliothek Bielefeld neue, innovative Services, meist als digitale Dienste, zu implementieren. Es werden drei beispielhafte Entwicklungen vorgestellt, die basierend auf vorhandener digitaler Expertise und etablierten Netzwerkstrukturen innerhalb der Hochschule kooperative Projekte in Zusammenarbeit mit Universitätseinrichtungen entwickeln. Dazu gehören das Projekt zur Digitalisierung des Luhmann-Zettelkastens, eine virtuelle Forschungsumgebung zur Erfassung und Visualisierung von Medienverbünden aus der Literaturwissenschaft und eine mit Methoden der Virtuellen Realität entwickelte Suchumgebung.

With the rise of immersive visualization techniques, many domains within the manufacturing industry are increasingly validating production processes in virtual reality (VR). The validity of the results gathered in such simulations, however, is widely unknown—in particular, with regard to human locomotion behavior. To bridge this gap, this article presents an experiment analyzing the behavioral disparity between human locomotion being performed without any equipment and in immersive VR while wearing a head-mounted display (HMD). The presented study (n= 30) is split up in three sections and covers linear walking, non-linear walking, and obstacle avoidance. Special care has been given to design the experiment so that findings are generally valid and can be applied to a wide range of domains beyond the manufacturing industry. The findings provide novel insights into the effect of immersive VR on specific gait parameters. In total, a comprehensive sample of 18.09km is analyzed. The results reveal that the HMD had a medium effect (up to 13%) on walking velocity, on non-linear walking toward an oriented target, and on clearance distance. The overall differences are modeled using multiple regression models, thus allowing the general usage within various domains. Summarizing, it can be concluded that VR can be used to analyze and plan human locomotion; however, specific details may have to be adjusted to transfer findings to the real world.

ZusammenfassungUnsere Augen sind für die Wahrnehmung unserer Umwelt wichtig und geben gleichzeitig wertvolle Informationen über unsere Aufmerksamkeit und damit unsere Denkprozesse preis. Wir Menschen nutzen dies ganz natürlich in der alltäglichen Kommunikation. Mit einer echtzeitfähigen Blickbewegungsmessung ausgestattet können auch technische Systeme den Nutzern wichtige Informationen von den Augen ablesen. Der Artikel beschreibt verschiedene Ansätze wie in der Konstruktion, der Instruktion von Robotern oder der Medizin Blickbewegungen nutzbringend eingesetzt werden können.

Traditionally, laboratory practice aims to establish schemas learned by students in theoretical courses through concrete experiences. However, access to laboratories might not always be available to students. Therefore, it is advantageous to diversify the tools that students could use to train practical skills. This technology report describes the design, development, and first testing of a mobile augmented reality application that enables a hands-on learning experience of a titration experiment. Additionally, it presents the extension of the TrainAR framework for chemical education through the implementation of specific domain features, i.e., logbook, graph, and practical oriented hints. To test the application, 15 participants were recruited from five different high schools and two universities in Belgium. The findings reflect that the MAR Lab app was well-received by the users. In addition, they valued the design elements (e.g., logbook and multiple-choice questions), and the system has “good” usability (SUS score 72.8, SD = 14.0). Nevertheless, the usability and learners’ experience can be improved by tackling technical problems, providing more explicit instructions for subtasks, and modifying certain features. Therefore, future development will concentrate on improving upon these shortcomings, adding additional levels to target a larger audience, and evaluating the improvements’ effects with more participants.